Today, most computers are linked to other computer systems via a computer network. A computer network is basically a collection of computers that are physically and logically connected together to exchange data or “information.” The network may be a local area network (LAN) in which computers are geographically close together and connected by short segments of ethernet or to the same network hub or a wide area network (WAN) in which computers are separated by a considerable distance and are connected by telephone lines or radio waves. Often, networks are configured as so-called client-server networks such that each computer on the network is either a client or a server. Servers are computers or processors dedicated to managing shared resources such as storage of electronic data. Any computer that performs a task at the command of another computer is a server.
FIG. 1 illustrates in a schematic block diagram manner a client-server system 100 with a user interface (UI) (not shown), for example a graphical user interface (GUI). A GUI client 118 typically resides on a personal computer 117. The GUI client 118 represents the so-called GUI engine. A server 112 represents the so-called execution engine. The client 118 and the server 112 are interconnected via a communication line 124 wherein communication is typically based on proprietary protocols. The communication line 124 can be realized in various manners well-known to the person skilled in the art in order to create a LAN, a WAN or larger networks, such as the Internet. User interface commands are interpreted by the GUI client 118 and communicated via a proprietary protocol to the server 112, which communicates with applications 126 via an application programming interface (API) 128 to execute the UI commands and then returns results to the GUI client 118. The results are then rendered on the stream of the personal computer.
In some applications, a client user wants to access archived data that is stored on a database interconnected with the server. If the application is a customizable application in which a user can custom design his (graphical) user interface, consistency and performance problems can occur if the user has designed a search mask with selection fields that are not consistent with an archived index of the archived set of data of the database. Therefore, due to customizing errors and/or inconsistencies the user might experience problems or the archive search might not work at all.